Audio 3:20
Researchers plan to starve melanoma cells

Ashley HallUpdated
Wed 19 Feb 2014, 9:43 PM AEDT

Researchers in Sydney have discovered a new approach to tackle the deadly skin cancer, melanoma. They've identified an amino acid that melanoma cells need to survive. If they can find a drug that will shut off the nutrients, they're confident it will kill the cancer.

Transcript

MARK COLVIN: Researchers in Sydney have discovered a new approach to melanoma.

Australia has the highest incidence in the world of this deadly skin cancer. Scientists now plan to starve the cancer's cells of the nutrients they need to grow.

Ashley Hall reports.

ASHLEY HALL: Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. In 2011, it killed more than 1,500 people in Australia. It can occur anywhere on the skin, including the soles of the feet. And unless it's detected early, the prognosis is not good.

JEFF HOLST: Once it spreads, it's a very, very fast-growing, very angry cancer cell.

ASHLEY HALL: Dr Jeff Holst is the head of the Origins of Cancer Research Group at the Centenary Institute in Sydney. He led the research into melanoma, published today in the International Journal of Cancer.

JEFF HOLST: Now, there's a number of treatments recently that have come forth targeting genetic mutations, and they really just blast the cancer away, they really hit it very, very hard, and for a few months the patient looks like they've got rid of the melanoma - but then it comes back. And this is what we're finding with melanoma is it has a lot of ways to get around the current treatments that we have and come back.

ASHLEY HALL: So this latest discovery is a cause for optimism.

JEFF HOLST: For me, one of the most exciting things about this that we're working off a discovery that was actually made in the 1920s, 1930s, by a man who made a great discovery about cancer cells and how they get energy is actually different to a normal cell - and he won the Nobel Prize for that in 1931. And so it's been 80 years since that research, but we're still discovering new ways that we can use that discovery to be able to target cancer cells.

ASHLEY HALL: And so how have you used that discovery in this situation?

JEFF HOLST: What we haven't known is actually how those particular nutrients that he found are actually brought into the cell in the first place, so our discovery is that there's an increase in the pumps that bring these nutrients into the cell to supply that energy, and therefore, if they're increased in cancer cells we might be able to block them, and therefore block the energy completely from the cancer cells.

ASHLEY HALL: So you're essentially starving the cancer cells?

JEFF HOLST: That's exactly, exactly it. If we can block these pumps, we can starve the cancer cells.

ASHLEY HALL: And Dr Holst says that's where things get a little more tricky.

JEFF HOLST: There's currently no drugs available to be able to block these pumps, so we're designing new drugs now to do exactly that, and so we'll go through testing, and then hopefully in future years be able to roll them into clinical trials.

ASHLEY HALL: You say in future years? How many years are we talking about?

JEFF HOLST: Well, generally it's thought that it takes up to 10 years to develop a drug.

ASHLEY HALL: This latest research builds on work published last year by the same team, which showed that prostate cancer cells require another amino acid for growth.

JEFF HOLST: The discovery in prostate cancer was one nutrient, called leucine, and we showed that we can starve those cells, and now in melanoma, we've shown a different nutrient, called glutamine, and indeed we're actually looking at that in prostate cancer and breast cancer as well.

ASHLEY HALL: Dr Holst warns that any new drugs developed to target the nutrient pumps in cancer cells are unlikely to be effective in killing cancer on their own. He says it's more likely they'll be used in combination with other drugs, similar to multi-pronged attack used in treatments for people with HIV.